Category: Indian Technology

The Motorola Xoom, the first Android tablet to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb which has been launched in the US since weeks, has finally shown some signs of coming to India.

Infibeam, a popular online store in India, has made the Motorola Xoom available in India for pre-order. It is priced at Rs 35,000 or $775, based on current exchange rates. It’s a bit surprising that the tablet will be available in India at a lower price than in the US where it is priced at $800. According to Infibeam, the Motorola Xoom will be released in India on 10 May 2011, and will start shipping in 3-4 days after the launch.

The Motorola Xoom is a very good Android tablet, and presently the only decent competitor to the Apple iPad 2. It has received good reviews but is priced a bit high, compared to the Apple iPad 2, which starts at $499, the same as the iPad. It is rumored that a Wi-Fi only version of the Xoom is in the works, and will cost substantially lower, closer to the $500 mark.

The Motorola Xoom has a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. It is powered by a 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1 GB RAM and comes with a 5 MP camera. It also has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity and comes with 32 GB internal storage.

Even though the Global economy is recovering from recession and major industries are getting back to gear, AOL seems to play it in a different way. Recently AOL acquired the news opinion website Huffingtonpost.com and it is after this development that the company plans to lay off around 70 per cent of AOL India’s total employee strength which currently stands at about 1000 employees.

The remaining employees would be the ones from the Technology team of AOL in India and they will be merged with a service provider like Infosys, MindTree, TCS or ITC Infotech and from that point they will work with AOL on a contract-outsourced model. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL has said that these layoffs would be done in a proper manner as he knew how does it feel to be laid off because his father had once been laid off.

It’s definitely good news for the Non-Engineering graduates but the Engineering graduates may face a job crisis given the current measures taken by IT companies in India to hire professionals. It is being speculated that, Indian IT firms will be interested in hiring more and more Non-Engineering graduates such as science (BSc), computer science (BCA) graduates and even diploma holders for profiles such as testing and support services at lower wages.

A hiring firm opines that student from science and commerce backgrounds have a high aptitude level and thus the IT companies feel that this aptitude can be converted to technical talent with some basic training. Companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, ITC Infotech and KPIT Cummins among others are hiring more of science and computer science graduates already.

Here are some facts:

Professionals from non-engineering backgrounds form about 5% of the total engineering workforce of Infosys. The company has hired close to 14,000 engineers and about 700 BSc graduates in 2010 – 2011.

Almost a year back Infibeam had made the headlines after it unveiled India’s first desi e-book reader. Infibeam Pi was totally manufactured in India and was posed to be a competitor for Amazon’s Kindle in India. Well, Infibeam has now launched the next version of Pi. Titled Pi2, this new device looks amazing as it now sports a touch screen and also has a built-in wi-fi for internet connectivity.

India is one of leading countries in the world which has seen a large growth in Internet usage. It also incidentally has the world’s largest number of mobile users, currently around 600 million.

So how much has India grown? Well, from a meager 25,000 users in 1998 it has grown to 100 million users. Though it is hardly 10% of the Indian population it still puts India at number 3 in world Internet users after China and the United States.

Internet was first started out in 1995 and has radically grown through the years. Most of the Indians go online to check emails, visit social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, download music, instant messaging, watching online videos and more. However, India does lag behind in one area; internet speed. They are currently ranked at number 144 with an average speed of 1.42 Mbps speed.

Interesting facts right? Check out the entire infographic of growth of Internet users in India through 2010 below (click to enlarge).

The whole of sub-continent might be in frenzy right now because of the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup 2011. The tournament which will see 14 cricketing nations battle it out for the ultimate glory in Cricket begins on February 19, 2011 with a match between India and Bangladesh.

To celebrate the event, Google has added a new Google Doodle representing cricket. The ICC World Cup Google Doodle features a batsman hitting a ball. It would have been much nicer if they could somehow include a bowler too. The Doodle is viewable at http://www.google.co.in.

Nevertheless, here is to all you cricket crazy fans in India and around the rest of the world. Have fun watching the ICC Cricket World Cup and pray that your team wins it.

As a part of it’s global philanthropic program, Google has announced that it will giving a grant of US$ 5 Million to Bharti Foundation in order to set up elementary education schools in India. Bharti Foundation happens to be the philanthropic unit of Bharti Enterprises Ltd which is the parent company of Bharti Airtel – One of India’s largest telecom companies.

Bharti Foundation will set up new schools and upgrade the existing schools in Northern part of India in the states: Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The schools will be named Satya Elemantary Schools. Bharti Foundation also plans to use these funds for setting up middle schools and upgrade the existing primary schools to support elementary level education.

Currently Bharti Foundation facilitates provision of basic education to poor children, especially girls, with the help of its 236 primary schools in villages and one senior secondary school. Starting from June, the foundation has plans of building 15 more primary schools and four senior secondary schools.

Testing services have been bringing a good amount of revenue for Wipro. During 2009-10, Testing services alone accounted for 12% of Wipro’s IT services revenues. In order to tap more out of the available potential on the IT testing sector, Wipro has launched a portal for Testing as a Service (TaaS) which will mainly cater to start-ups and small, medium businesses. With the launch of this service, Wipro feels that many new companies may now come under the Wipro fold.

The portal has 5 different services as of now and this will be increased to include 20 more services and other Wipro services by the end of this month. It has taken Wipro more than 10 months to launch this service. However, companies like Patni, HP, Cloud9 & uTest are already offering TaaS but they stick to only one TaaS offering (for e.g. cloud testing). Wipro’s TaaS service is different and covers a lot of avenues which others don’t.

Mr Gangadharaiah, SVP of Testing Services at Wipro feels that the TaaS portal helps both Wipro’s and it’s client’s employees to share information in a better way. He also said that coaching 700 new people is a big job and the new portal will assist in that by making all information related to Testing right at one place.

The movie which stars Salman Khan, Arbaaz Khan, Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna is about a corrupt cop who fights with politician goons who are corrupt than him. The movie was a breakaway success and was one of the biggest hits of 2010. Salman Khan also picked up several awards for the movie at the recent Star Screen awards.

The movie also famous for the song Munni Badnaam which contains lyrics that feature a popular pain reliever in India; Zandu Balm. Now the full movie is available to watch online on YouTube, this is definitely a very bold move by Arbaaz Khan who also produced the movie.

TeachNext is a Set-Top-Box solution focusing on the Indian Education sector. It is an end-to-end solution providing the complete package right from a STB, it’s remote and state-of-the-art software and content comprising of the most updated syllabus.

The TeachNext STB is a custom-built STB with capabilities of delivering content to either the Projector or a LCD television. The software contains chapter-wise “Lesson Plans” created by experienced teachers and educationalists. Apart from adhering to India’s CBSE board syllabus, the content follows the NCERT guidelines. The courses are so designed as to cater for Teacher-led classrooms as well as for self-learning.

Some other features of this unique solution are :

2D & 3D Audio-Visual lessons for K12

An evaluation system that covers all aspects of a student’s development.

An innovative tools called “NextStudio” which comes with an image library of over 13000 images.

Content partnerships with various international content developers to provide quality e-learning experience.

Question Paper software for frequent student evaluations.

To get a taste of TeachNext’s software, head to their demo page and watch the demos various subjects like Biology, Physics, Chemistry , Math, etc.

TeachNext is not just a startup product. TeachNext has started advertising on mainstream Indian television channels during prime-time programs.Watch some of their Ads here.

They already have a list of schools who are using their product in their classrooms. In fact, they claim to have more than 1000 clients already. If the likes of Panbai International School, one of the premier schools in Mumbai, India , have already embraced this solution, one can image that other International schools may have followed the trend.

Is this the future of education ? Will digitizing the classroom boost productivity while retaining the short attention spans and providing valuable education, all at the same time ?